Observation is the cornerstone of creation—and that’s very much the way Joe Fig sees his role an artist. The Sarasota-based painter, sculptor, and author got his start in the 1980s working at the Bowery studio of a German expressionist-style painter who liked to listen to jazz as he worked. Those tunes, and the distinct smells of the oil paints and rabbit-skin glue used to stretch canvases, are forever imprinted in Fig’s memory.
“It was something from another time,” says Fig of that formative period when he first noted the preparation that comes in advance of endeavor. “I just loved being there.”
A decade later, when he enrolled in the graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Fig tapped into those memories. “I started looking at the studio as a form of portraiture and how each different studio reflects an artist’s own creative process, and, consequently, part of the artist’s personality,” he says. Over the years, these musings have inspired Fig’s own work (which includes a large oeuvre of oil paintings and sculptures, as well as two books that explore the artistic process) and they very much inform his new exhibition at the Sarasota Art Museum, Contemplating Vermeer (November 17, 2024 to April 13, 2025).